Five Years, No End in Sight

Devastation on the ground and widely held Iraqi
opinion contradicts claims by U.S. officials that the situation in Iraq has
improved toward the fifth anniversary of the invasion March 20.

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney during a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday declared
the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq a "successful endeavor."

According to the group Just Foreign Policy, more than a million Iraqis have
died as a result of the invasion and occupation, now entering its sixth year.
A survey by British polling agency ORB estimates the number of dead at more
than 1.2 million.

Nobel laureate and former chief World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz recently
published a book with co-author Linda Bilmes of Harvard University titled The
Three Trillion Dollar War, a figure it considers a "conservative
estimate" of the long-range price tag of the invasion and occupation of
Iraq.

The authors say the Bush administration has repeatedly "low-balled"
the cost of the war and has kept a set of records hidden from the U.S. public.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, close to 4,000 U.S. soldiers have
been killed. The number of British casualties is 175.

"The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought
by Britain," journalist Patrick Cockburn of London's Independent
newspaper wrote March 17. "It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as
conflicts which could have been avoided, and were demonstrations of incompetence
from start to finish."

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 4
million Iraqis are displaced from their homes, with roughly half of them outside
of the country.

The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that one in every four residents of Baghdad,
a city of 6 million, is displaced from home.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a report March 17 that
millions are still deprived of clean water and medical care.

Iraq's infrastructure is worse on every measurable level compared to Iraq under
the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and including 12 years of the harshest economic
sanctions in history. During those sanctions more than a million Iraqis died
from malnutrition, disease, and lack of medical care.

The international aid group Oxfam International released a report last July
that found that 4 million Iraqis were in need of emergency assistance. It found
a 9 percent increase in childhood malnutrition and that 70 percent of Iraqis
lacked access to safe drinking water.

The average home in Iraq, even in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, which has
been held up by the Bush administration as an example of success, has on average
less than five hours of electricity a day.

Oil exports, from which Iraq has obtained over 80 percent of its income, have
not for a single day of the occupation matched prewar levels.

Unemployment, already 32 percent before the invasion, has vacillated during
the occupation between 40-70 percent, according to the Iraqi government.

With more than a million dead, more than 4 million displaced, and another 4
million in need of emergency aid, a third of Iraqis are displaced, in need of
emergency aid, or dead.

All this Cheney calls a "successful endeavor."

Soon after he said that, a suicide bomber killed at least 32 and wounded 51
near a mosque in the holy Shia city Karbala, south of Baghdad. Bombings in Baghdad
near the Green Zone just after Cheney arrived killed another four and wounded
13.

Baghdad has become the most dangerous city in the world, largely as a result
of a U.S. policy of pitting various Iraqi ethnic and sectarian groups against
one another. Today Baghdad is a city of walled-off Sunni and Shia ghettoes,
divided by concrete walls erected by the U.S. military.

These areas even fly their own flags: Sunni areas fly the old Iraqi flag, Shias
use the new version, and the Kurds have their own flag.

Republican Party presidential candidate John McCain, also in Iraq, met with
Iraqi leaders as part of a Senate Armed Services Committee fact-finding mission.
He, like Cheney, said he would support the Iraqi government and maintain a long-term
military commitment in Iraq.

"The surge is working," McCain told reporters, referring to the troop
buildup in Baghdad.

With "enduring" U.S. military bases established in Iraq, and an embassy
in Baghdad the size of the Vatican City, there appears to be no end in sight
for the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, Dahr Jamail writes about the
effects of the US occupation on the people of Iraq, since the mainstream
media in the US has in large part, he believes, failed to do so.

Dahr has spent a total of 5 months in occupied Iraq, and plans
on returning in October to continue reporting on the occupation.
One of only a few independent reporters in Iraq, Dahr will be using
the DahrJamailIraq.com
website and mailing list to disseminate his dispatches and will
continue as special correspondent for Flashpoints Radio.

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